The good doctor stares from your television through her no-nonsense spectacles. She looks like the Girl Scout cookie sale coordinator across the street, or maybe your mom. Among other things, she wants to improve your sex technique.
Do this, she says. Don’t do that. Got a question you’ve always been afraid to ask? She’ll probably answer it. Then, as the VCR tape continues to roll, she introduces Mary and Robert, the nice couple who will demonstrate.
“Use this video like a textbook,” advises sex therapist Judy Seifer, the co-host of the eight-volume Better Sex Video Series, the most popular sexual how-to videos on the market. “Stop the videotape. Freeze the picture if you want to talk about something that you see. Rewind the tape and watch some techniques over and over. Study them, just like you’d review a chapter in a book.”
Here, then, is the latest manifestation of sex in the ’90s, a combination porn film and homework assignment. With an emphasis on rejuvenating monogamous love lives and workmanlike advice about sexual problem-solving, the see-and-do home videos are a sort of “This Old House” for people not handy with tools.
Helpful to a point
Michael Gonzales, an Irvine, Calif., clinical psychologist who lectures on human sexuality at the University of California, Irvine, said sex-education films can be helpful.
“In exploring new options. In opening communications. In being able to point to the screen and say, `That’s what I mean.’
“But they also can be very harmful,” he said. “I haven’t seen this particular series, but a lot of the stuff that’s out there, no matter how well it’s presented, still perpetuates myths and stereotypes. . . . People start self-evaluating, saying, `Gee, I don’t look as good as he or she does. We don’t have as many orgasms as they do.’
“It’s subtle, but it’s there,” he said. “Good sex-education films need to address all those issues.”
Is a `C -‘ too kind?
True, the Better Sex Video Series and its chief rival, the Great Sex Video Series, have a lot in common with many less pretentious X-rated films. Bad sets, bad acting, minimal plot lines and the same startling explicitness of porn films.
“Hey, if a video about sexuality isn’t hot and erotic, then you’re not capturing the essence of sexuality,” said Stephen Kapelow, the Better Sex series producer.
There are significant differences between the videos and typical pornography, though. You’ll see occasional dollops of flab and awkward repositionings-to make viewers comfortable with themselves, producers say-and a studied emphasis on communication, trust and partnership. Missing are the occasional violence and male domination scenes characteristic of the skin-film trade.
“The family values concept stresses the importance of families staying together, as opposed to having throwaway relationships,” said Kapelow, whose Florida-based companies produce what he estimates are 95 percent of the sexual how-to videos on the market, including the Better Sex tapes.
Mistakes along the way
Undaunted by the fact that his background is in real estate and rock-music promotion, the retired millionaire believed that videos were the most promising medium, because he said the “MTV/`Miami Vice’ world we live in” is peopled by adults weaned on television who don’t like to read.
The Better Sex project got off to a rocky start. Volunteers were scarce, so Kapelow paid pornographic film actors and actresses to pose as the typical couples depicted in some of his early videos. He still makes the typical-couples claim in national magazine ads, but some may recognize Bill, “a co-pilot for a major airline,” as porn star Rick Savage.
He also used explicit footage from commercial pornography films in volumes 4 through 8 of the Better Sex series, which deal with sexual fantasy.
“I would never do it again, because it allowed people who were objecting to them as pornography to call them pornography,” Kapelow said of the decisions. He added that ensemble players are plentiful now that he has more than 30 tapes to his credit and his reputation is established.
Then there was the nasty incident with Fred and Linda Shotz. They were advisers and on-screen experts for the Better Sex Series when it was released in 1989. But in 1990, a Florida newspaper revealed discrepancies in Fred’s academic credentials from California Coast University in Santa Ana, which says he never received the doctoral degree that Shotz once claimed.
Shotz suspects he was drummed out of the project for reasons having more to do with promised royalty payments, a version Kapelow vigorously disputes. Regardless, Kapelow pulled the Better Sex series from the market and re-edited the tapes using Seifer and Michael Kollar, whose extensive credentials as sex therapists are trumpeted at the start of each video.
Harsh words
Since 1991, the toll-free order line for the Better Sex series has rung steadily-often enough to finance the $300,000 to $400,000 a month that Kapelow says he spends to advertise his $29.95 videos in everything from Playboy to USA Today. And although he’s cagey about figures, his North Carolina-based distributor said individual tape sales recently passed the 350,000 mark.
Interest also is brisk in the 40-volume “Videos for Lovers” series, which feature volunteer couples narrating themselves through their regular motions, “Sex Over 50” and other specialty-market tapes that Kapelow has produced.
The Better Sex Series isn’t without critics, even in the microscopically small how-to sex-video producing community. Toronto-based Frank G. Sommers, a one-time Kapelow consultant, beat Kapelow to market. He began producing his own three-volume Great Sex Series in 1978. Though his sales figures pale in comparison to Kapelow’s, he scornfully dismisses the Better Sex Series as inferior and scoffs at Kapelow’s claims about featuring typical couples.
“Typical?” Sommers said. “I see (in Kapelow’s tapes) bodies that are carefully groomed, women with huge red fingernails having sex in their offices. That’s not typical. That’s perpetuating a (myth). It’s really pornography, and it should be called what it is.”
Sommers videos are less sophisticated in film quality, though he says they are far more useful as diagnostic tools for legitimate sex therapists. They also focus less on performance enhancement than they do on the human relationship aspects of sex.
“Authenticity is a distinguishing characteristic of my films,” says Sommers. They deal with feelings and emphasize the fusion of sex and love. That, to me, is a fundamentally important issue.”
Looking to expand
If Kapelow has his way, the how-to sex video industry is in its infancy. He says he’s working with a major network interested in producing a weekly, hourlong late-night national TV program on human sexuality.
“It’ll be hosted by doctors, and it won’t be just a talk show,” he said. “There’ll be a lot of carefully created material. Nothing explicit, of course, but we’ll do the best job we can within the censorship limits of TV.”
It’s a bold vision from a man secure about his place in history.
“Sure, we’ve made mistakes all through the process,” Kapelow said. “But we’re basically creating a new industry. It’s never been done before, and to the best of my knowledge, the world has never seen mass-market sexual education before us.”
Thanks to promoters like Kapelow, the world is seeing it now. And in considerable detail.
